Cisco wants to bring the power of the data center to wherever customers need it most, whether it’s in a public cloud, on-premises, or at the edge.

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Posted by CRN on January 29, 2019:

Cisco wants to bring the power of the data center to wherever customers need it most, whether it’s in a public cloud, on-premises, or at the edge.

To that end, Cisco took to Cisco Live in Barcelona to unveil a series of updates to its data center portfolio, including the expansion of applications-centric infrastructure (ACI) to the public cloud, the extension of HyperFlex to the edge, and enhancements to its CloudCenter offering. The updates, according to Cisco, are moving the data center from a centralized, to a distributed model, to get networking, compute and storage closer to where the demand is located.

“Cisco is trying to focus more on services and applications, and less on the data center aspects of operation,” said Ryan Marsyla, strategic director of architecture for Trace3, an Irvine, Calif.-based managed service provider and Cisco partner.

At the same time, customers are looking for a simplified, automated, and scalable operations model across their entire infrastructure, according to Brian Ortbals, vice president of advanced technology for solution provider and fellow Cisco partner, World Wide Technology (WWT).

“So much has changed around where our customer’s data lives, so it’s created an entirely new mindset around the infrastructure itself in the spirit of trying to create a better experience for users and operators,” Ortbals said.

In its latest series of data center product updates, Cisco is simplifying what it takes for businesses to connect applications to the cloud and to the edge, including branch or remote locations, he said.

“Our customers need to be able to more quickly provision, operate, and troubleshoot their infrastructure, whether it’s in their data center, in a third party’s cloud, or at the edge,” Ortbals said.

Cisco on Wednesday in Spain revealed that ACI, its intent-based networking solution for the data center and remote locations, will be available in AWS and Microsoft Azure environments starting in Cisco’s Q2, letting businesses extend ACI into these popular Infrastructure as a Service environments.